What do you think of this fact?
You climb a staircase, and at the top there’s: ceiling. You open a door, and behind it there’s: wall. At the Winchester Mystery House in San Jose, California, that’s just normal. The house has around 160 rooms and is considered one of the strangest buildings in the US.
The heiress who kept on building
It was built by Sarah Winchester. Her husband William was the son of rifle maker Oliver Winchester. He died in 1881, and their baby daughter Annie had died years earlier. Sarah inherited a huge fortune, moved to California in the mid-1880s and bought a farmhouse. Then she started adding on. And kept going until her death in 1922.
By the time she died, the house had around 160 rooms, about 2,000 doors, 10,000 windows, 47 staircases and 47 fireplaces. Then there are the famous oddities: stairs that end in the ceiling, doors and cabinets that open onto bare walls, and windows in the middle of the house.
What the legend says
The famous story goes like this: a medium in Boston supposedly told Sarah that the spirits of everyone killed by Winchester rifles were haunting her. She would only be safe if she never stopped building. The stairs to nowhere were meant to confuse the ghosts.
None of this is documented. The alleged medium doesn’t show up in any Boston records, and historian Mary Jo Ignoffo took apart many of the myths in her biography. Sarah’s own letters deal with practical things, like a hallway that was too dark. In one, she even wrote that she had sent the workmen home for the winter. So much for “nonstop”.
The down-to-earth explanation
Many of the dead ends were probably caused by the 1906 earthquake. It destroyed a tower and large parts of the upper floors, and Sarah never rebuilt much of it. What was left were stairs and doors that suddenly led nowhere.
One staircase in the house has 44 steps but rises only about 3 meters. The shallow steps are said to have made climbing easier for Sarah, who was very short and in poor health.
No haunting, just an earthquake, a strong will and a very big budget. It still looks spooky.